The Millions Top Ten: January 2012

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We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for January.

The real mover in July was Annie Proulx's Barkskins, which climbed three spots from tenth to seventh, a rise no doubt attributable to Claire Cameron's strong endorsement in her "Summer Reading List for Wretched Assholes Who Prefer to Wallow in Someone Else’s Misery."

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for November.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for May.

May has come and gone, and the weather is warming. But is that due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun, or is it due to the amount of energy being expelled by Millions writers hard at work at the upcoming Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview, which will hit these pages in about a month? My guess is the latter, but in the mean time, grab a drink and stay cool.

This month, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, has vaulted into our Hall of Fame. It’s a book that our own Michael Bournerightly called “a literary sensation,” albeit one that, at first glance, did not have the makings of a smash hit. As Bourne explained it:
This is a 500-page novel about a war increasingly few Americans are old enough to remember, in which not one of the principal characters is American. This is a recipe for a well-regarded literary novel, perhaps even a prize-winning critical darling. But a breakout bestseller so popular it leaves Amazon’s vast warehouses empty of copies at Christmas? Not likely. So what then explains the success of All the Light We Cannot See? It all, I would argue, comes down to Doerr’s sentences, in particular his masterly use of nouns and verbs.
You’ll have to check out the rest of the review for some examples. (Or you could check out both of Doerr’s past Year in Reading entries, too: 2010; 2014.)

The lone newcomer this month is Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, Satin Island. A few months back, here’s what our own Garth Risk Hallberg had to say about it:
McCarthy’s fourth novel introduces us to a “corporate anthropologist” struggling to wrest an overarching account of contemporary existence from a miasma of distraction and dream. Perhaps he’s a stand-in for your average internet user. Or novelist. At any rate, expect ideas and delight in equal measure (assuming there’s a distinction); McCarthy’s reputation as a “standard bearer of the avant-garde” underrates how thoroughly he’s mastered the novelistic conventions he’s concerned to interrogate – and how fun he is to read.
Certainly sounds appealing. Join us next month, but remember: with the Great Second-Half Preview on the horizon, it’ll be a good idea to keep some space open on your “to be read” pile until that’s posted.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for May.

April showers bring May flowers, but a month of May book purchases launched Michael Chabon’sMoonglow into our Hall of Fame. It’s the author’s second appearance there; Telegraph Avenue made the list four years back.

Chabon’s success freed up an opening on this month’s Top Ten. Filling his place in 8th position is another author who’s no stranger to our Hall of Fame: Haruki Murakami. In our Great 2017 Book Preview, Murakami’s latest story collection, Men Without Women, was said to “concern the lives of men who, for one reason or another, find themselves alone.” Emily St. John Mandel continued:
In “Scheherazade,” a man living in isolation receives regular visits from a woman who claims to remember a past life as a lamprey; in “Yesterday,” a university student finds himself drawn into the life of a strange coworker who insists that the student go on a date with his girlfriend.
Could this book become Murakami’s third to make our Hall of Fame? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile Derek B. Miller’sNorwegian by Night continues its reign over our list, further demonstrating that if you want to sell books to Millions readers, you ought to get an endorsement from Richard Russo first.

Elsewhere on the list, a few movers moved and shakers shook, but overall things held steady. Next month, we’ll likely graduate two titles to our Hall of Fame, which means we’ll welcome two more newcomers. By then, we’ll be in full swing with our Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview, which was a shocking thing to type. Can 2018 come soon enough?

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for January.